The UK government owes money primarily to domestic and foreign investors who buy its government bonds (gilts), including UK pension funds, insurance companies, banks, households, and overseas entities, with the Bank of England also holding a significant portion from quantitative easing. Key holders include UK financial institutions (pension/insurance funds), foreign investors (US, Japan), and the Bank of England itself, making debt a broad claim on future tax revenue by the private sector and central bank.
The British government's debt is owned by a wide variety of investors, most notably pension funds. These funds are on deposit, mainly in the form of Treasury bonds at the Bank of England. The pension funds, therefore, have an asset which has to be offset by a liability, or a debt, of the government.
It's difficult to pinpoint an exact figure for how much the UK owes China, as the UK doesn't track this specifically, but estimates from around 2018 suggested China held significant UK debt, potentially around 15% of overseas holdings (roughly £267 billion), primarily through Chinese financial institutions buying UK government bonds (gilts). While China is a major holder of UK debt, most of the national debt is held domestically by UK entities like pension funds, and Chinese holdings include commercial banks and institutions rather than just the Chinese state.
From 1st July, 1932, the repayments were suspended in accordance with the arrangements made at the Lausanne Conference and have not since been resumed.At the end of 1964 the unpaid balance of the United Kingdom's World War II and Post-War debt to the United States of America was $4,222 millions.
The answer is revealing. More than 80% of global government debt is privately owned — and largely by pension funds, life assurance companies and, ultimately, the world's wealthiest households. The 1% benefit enormously from the interest payments we all fund.
Each led to massive interventions, with borrowing never falling back to pre-crisis levels. After piling up debt upon debt, the UK and France owe the same amount - around £2.9tr (€3.3tr).
1 United States 21,764,799 2 Euro area 18,075,643 3 United Kingdom 9,837,535 4 France 7,368,685 5 Norway 7,110,029 6 Germany 6,6,91,139 7 Japan 4,687,815 8 Netherlands 4,197,719 9 Luxembourg 3,965,300 10 Italy 2,749,75 https://www.ceicdata. com/en/indicator/norway/external-debt--of-nominal- gdp https://www.gfmag.com/ ...
There is no independent country that is completely debt-free. Having national debt is considered normal in modern economic systems. The country with the highest national debt is Japan. The United States is not a debt-free country.
The majority of UK debt used to be held by the UK private sector, in particular, UK insurance and pension funds. In recent years, the Bank of England has bought gilts taking its holding to 25% of UK public sector debt. Overseas investors own about 28% of UK gilts (2023).
The current level is more than double that seen from the 1980s through to the financial crisis of 2008. The combination of the financial crash and the Covid pandemic pushed the UK's debt up. But, in relation to the size of the economy, UK debt figures are still low compared with much of the last century.
The United States has the world's largest national debt in absolute dollar terms (over $38 trillion in 2025), followed by China and Japan, with these three countries holding a majority of the world's government debt. However, when measured as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Japan often ranks highest (around 230%), indicating a larger debt burden relative to its economic size.
The U.S. can theoretically pay off its massive national debt, but it's practically impossible in the short term, requiring extreme measures like massive spending cuts, huge tax hikes, or drastically faster economic growth, none of which are politically feasible. Instead of full repayment, the focus is on managing the debt by servicing interest payments, which becomes sustainable if economic growth outpaces interest rates, but recent rate hikes are straining the budget, necessitating fiscal discipline through budget balancing, tax reform, and spending reductions in popular programs like Social Security and Medicare.
At the end of 2024, 12 out of 27 EU countries reported debt to GDP ratios higher than 60.0%, while 5 EU countries recorded debt to GDP ratios of more than 100.0%: Greece recorded the highest debt to GDP ratio (154.2%), followed by Italy (134.9%), France (113.2%), Belgium (103.9%) and Spain (101.6%).
In total, the Allies took about $413 million worth of reparations (both in money and in goods) from their occupation zones. In 1952, the London Agreement on German External Debts assessed the final reparation figure at $3 billion. Germany has yet to pay off its debts for World War II.
There are (at least?) two instances of the UK defaulting. In 1932, in the grip of the Great Depression, Britain (and France) defaulted on First World War debt to the United States – the so-called inter-allied debt.
The Anglo-American loan, officially the Anglo-American Loan Agreement, was a loan made to the United Kingdom by the United States on 15 July 1946. The loan kept the British economy afloat after the Second World War.
Japan consistently ranks among the countries with the highest national debt. In 2022, the nation's debt was estimated at almost 10 trillion U.S. dollars , while its GDP is just 4.2 trillion . The Japanese government is currently spending around half of its total tax revenue on servicing its massive debt.
This high level of government debt mainly stems from decades of persistent fiscal deficits and near-zero economic growth, both largely driven by Japan's aging population. By the mid-1970s, Japan's fertility rate had fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.
